Sunday, June 11, 2006

Got up at 4am thanks to a constant burning sensation in my stomach and food pipe. After half-hour or so of self-healing (Reiki) was feeling much better and decided to cleanup pending issues.

First up was a new cairo build for win32 based on 1.1.6 snapshot. Cairo is used in Acharya (and peixes) for printing and PDF export. However, the prebuilt binaries that come with gtk-win32 installers do not have PDF enabled. Started the build with ./configure --enable-pdf=yes under MSYS only to find that the PDF backend uses freetype2 for handling fonts and fontconfig to locate them. Fortunately, the gtk-win32 installer came bundled with these libs. After setting the appropriate include and library paths, GCC (Mingw) started to grind the sources. There were minor hiccups building the thing but finally managed to get a working dll and import lib built. After that, enabled the postscript and PDF export code in peixes, rebuilt and things were working!

Next, was forcefully dragged to Nandu's first birthday celebrations ( <tamil>aandu niraivu</tamil>) where I met some old friends, aunties and uncles. Had to answer a lot of questions including tough ones like "what the hell are you doing in Salem?". Had a good lunch though.

Next was playing cricket with the colony kids. As usual, lost the first match (first match is always for lord ganesha ;-) ) . Pulled out half way through the second match as the stomach pain started to surface again. Reiki to the rescue. But should consult the doc to find out what the hell is wrong...

Late in the evening, was back to cleanups - this time, repository migration. I really like darcs. It is simple to use, decentralized, plays well with other tools (ssh, curl, email patches etc) and most importantly (the coolness factor), written in Haskell ;). Speed seems to an issue for some people - not for me as my repositories are very small, so most operations are fast.

Back in ETV, I used Subversion to hold the code for Peixes and the IMLI. After coming home, I simply restored the repository from the dump file and continued working. This turned out to be bad thing to do because of the centralized design of subversion. Since I triple boot to Linux, Windoze and PC-BSD, repository management has become a pain. Hence the switch to darcs. I used tailor to migrate the subversion repository to a darcs one. The migration was smooth and I hope nothing was left out! - will know in the coming days...

Then came my weekly doze of code reading. Looked at different implementations of RunArray including Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, SWT and Haiku-OS. It was interesting to compare the implementations. More about that in a later post.

So, at the end of a long day, waiting for a call from a friend without which my Sunday is not complete, after which zzzzzzZZZZZZZ.